Generally refrigerators such as under-counter chillers are used to store all sorts of food and beverage items. The food and beverage items must be stored within certain temperature ranges, otherwise the food and beverages might get spoilt. Refrigerators are a key asset and play a major role in Quick Service Restaurants. As an example, some of the typical refrigerators are Make lines, Walk in coolers, Walk in Freezers, under Counter Chillers etc. These refrigerators mainly fall in two categories, continuously used refrigerators and intermittently used refrigerators. Continuously used refrigerators are the refrigerators that operate continuously every day. Intermittently used refrigerators are the refrigerators that are operated during only certain times of the day.
Refrigerators are critical for restaurants as they have an impact on taste as well as the food safety. Refrigeration also contributes around 10-20% of the energy usage of a site that comprises the refrigerators, as these assets have high hours of usage. The non-availability or downtime of the refrigerators may cause business disruption at the site resulting in loss of sales. Also the downtime of the refrigerators may lead to throwing away food and beverages where temperature critical limits have been breached. Therefore there is a need to monitor the refrigerators regularly.
The existing techniques in use are of legacy technology which does not have the ability for Internet of Things (IoT). As a result of which collecting data related to refrigerators for on-going monitoring is not possible. However, there are some controllers available in the market which can be mounted on the refrigerators to generate the data. But the challenge is that the existing controllers which monitor the refrigerators are very expensive. Therefore, the existing controllers do not provide complete details about performance of the refrigerator for the management to adopt them for performance measurement. All these problems are applicable even for the intermittently used refrigerators where the controllers do not exist or the details about the performance of the refrigerator provided is completely un-realistic. The intermittently used refrigerators have lifespan of multiple years and are expensive. With the existing technology, to analyse complete details about the performance of the intermittently used refrigerators, the management of the restaurants may have to change the existing intermittently used refrigerators with new IoT ready refrigerators. But buying new IoT ready refrigerators is very expensive for the management personnel of restaurants. So the management personnel of the restaurants may not opt to replace the existing refrigerators with the latest IoT ready refrigerators.
Therefore, there is need for a method and a device for managing the energy as well as operational performance of intermittently used refrigerators at a feasible price.